The GTM Mistakes Founders Make—and How RevOps Can Fix Them

SANDI (00:06):

Today we are joined by one of our oldies, one of our faves. I should call her oldies.

CHRIS

You just called her old.

LAURA

Hey, I'm only 21.

SANDI

I know. Okay. Okay. So take two, and I know Joey's going to leave this in. We are joined by a colleague and Rev ops genius, Laura "Wheels" Wheeler. She is the co-founder of RVNU. And we are here to chat about all things go to market, rev ops. We may even talk about singing and karaoke a little bit. A conversation's going to run the gamut. But Wes welcome. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. And why don't you introduce yourself or tell us a little bit more about RVNU since I went a hundred percent personal and outed you.

LAURA (01:05):

Yeah, yeah. Well I appreciate it. I'm very excited to be here today. So my background is revenue operations, but from the long stint I have been in sales, in enablement, in operations. I know that you met me as a revenue operator and I think that we stumble into revenue operations in one of two paths. Either finance numbers driven or from the business itself, from go to market because we saw problems that persisted. So I spent most of my career at Tableau Software nine years pre IPO post acquisition. It was a wild ride to May I say. And then we met at a small startup because I wanted to build again. And what we learned there was was a landscape that was happening. No one knew that we were going to go into maybe a slight recession. I'm not going to call it a recession, but that 2002 or 2022, 2021 era leading into it was really tough. And what the signals that we got in that business that we were all in really kind of pushed me to understand the foundational cracks that were in early stage startups. And so RVNU was born, I wanted to go out on my own and help morph early stage founders, really make sure that they had the proper go-to-market foundation so that in the future, if we are in a recession, I'm not saying it's recession proof, but at least they will be a little bit prepared and have readiness to weather the storm.

(02:42):

So that's it.

SANDI (02:46):

Awesome. Well thanks for that. So why don't we start by maybe talking about some of the signals that, or some of the reasons why founders come reach out to you and want to talk about go to market or talk about how they should build their company. What kinds of questions do you get from founders?

LAURA (03:05):

Yeah, this is probably similar to what you all are hearing, but they say, my sales team, it's not working. Our growth has slowed. Our top of funnel is dried up. We don't know what is happening within our business because we've run really quickly and those are the fires that are going off in a founder's head. They have to report to the board the outlook is not so good. And so they go seek out either help or resources to find what is happening and start to diagnose. And typically I found myself having the same conversation and this was my gut decision or my gut telling me that people are building sales teams too early without having signal, without having the go-to-market foundation in understanding their ICP or their value prop or their positioning their product in the wrong way. And then they have early success and they go build a sales team and it's not repeatable and then they have to go backwards.

(04:09):

And over the last eight months I've been having the same conversation with founders and they've been taking our assessment and we just went through and curated data from our go-to-market assessment totally free. We use it for our scoping, but what we actually found in our framework is that founders are operating for phases ahead of where they actually should be. And so when we think about the excitement and the desire to, I just raised capital, now I'm going to go build a sales team and spend all my money, they don't really know where and they don't know the ROI that each dollar that they put in, it's going to get X out. So it's like what levers do they need to pull? And so it's really fascinating. I'm not saying that this is something unique to every company, but the data is telling us that founders are moving too quickly. And I don't know if you all are seeing that as well, but it is definitely a top of mind trend that's happening in our neck of the woods.

CHRIS (05:13):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Seeing that. And by the way, it's great to see you again.

LAURA (05:17):

Yeah,

CHRIS (05:19):

We worked together as well. And I have to say, you're one of the best ops person I've ever seen coming into coming into startup land for sure. And thank you. Just the level of, I think professionalism and also knowledge that you bring within those environments is really, really awesome to see. So given that that's a huge setup. So given that if they are coming in too early, if they are trying to accelerate too fast, and I see that all the time too, but within that process, this is the real key for us. We see the founder sales sales and that's a very different animal than trying to build out a sales team. So how do you back up, but then how do you create what you just talked about? How do you create that repeatable process from, even if it's just a rev ops perspective, how do you do that?

LAURA (06:15):

Yeah. Well it's funny because I always say there are two different aisles of cleanup. One is, oops, I grew too fast and we have to go backwards. And that is sometimes good because you're already collecting data, sometimes you already have the systems in place. It's just going back and making sense of it, cleaning it up. What we're also seeing is that founders have now heard this narrative and maybe they're an early stage founder, I'm saying maybe just shy of a million, maybe a million to 3 million in a RR. And they're terrified to make these mistakes, which is good. And now they're seeking how can I de-risk? So a lot of people think that operations comes away later like, oh, I don't need someone to think about operations. We all need to wear that hat, whether it's marketing, sales, the founder product. And so the general mechanisms of setting up some sort of operational cadence as early as you can start with understanding and documenting the early stage stuff, who are you actually targeting?

(07:23):

So your ICP account, firmographics, what is the actual message of the value prop that you are sending out to people that's messaging that resonates on the website, making sure that there's a cohesive strategy that you're capturing where leads are coming from. Dude, you can do this in a spreadsheet. I'm totally okay with that. I'm very pro spreadsheet, but at some point we are going to have to move past a spreadsheet because hopefully velocity and volume gets in the way. And so we are now processing a lot. And so then you start thinking about and mapping out, okay, well what is my actual funnel process? So now I have people coming into the funnel I'm selling, and that includes top of funnel lead capture to lead source to how do I do discovery? And then I go into this actual sales funnel and start collecting clients.

(08:17):

So we can start very easy in a spreadsheet collecting data and attributes about the actions that are happening. Then that eventually gets into a system that eventually turns into insights, more than likely, eventually has to get cleaned up and then we start to take action in the business. But in those early days, we are chasing signals, but the best thing that you can do is to capture signals and talk about it with your team. And that includes product. I'll just plug that in there because in those early days you're launching an MVP and that product team needs feedback. So that's kind of the often missed element I think in very early stage startups is the iteration loop with product.

ERIN (09:06):

And do you feel like founders realize that they have this issue or is this kind of you start having a conversation, you're like, may

LAURA (09:15):

I point

ERIN (09:15):

Something

LAURA (09:15):

Out? How does it usually work? It's funny and I would love to hear from you all as well, but most of the time, no, because then it becomes the finger pointing game because they don't know who to blame when things start to potentially look, everything's good when everything is good, nobody cares if it's, I mean, it can be smooth sailing, let's build the most badass MVP and go sell it. And people are so excited about it. But the second that something turns in the business and maybe some revenue is lost, you lose a big customer and you don't have any operational excellence. Oh boy, it is the blame game because, and I am not blaming anyone, it's just they don't know. And either they're relying on their gut of, oh, it's this person or this leader or this thing that we're missing. It's the sales team. And unfortunately it's realized a little too late. The good founders though, will be really curious. And that's actually something that I try to teach founders when they're interacting with data in the interim is be curious, ask questions about the business, what's happening and what do you need to know? And let's write that down and see if we can track it today or not. And that's our roadmap.

SANDI (10:39):

Yeah, we see that a lot. A couple of the symptoms that usually show up for us are, unfortunately a couple of times we've had to say, congratulations, you've been selling but you don't have product market fit yet. So all these gyrations are going through all this thrashing that you're going through is because you're running up the wrong hill. Or it's either that or sometimes there's the message, the message creep, like scope creep, right? There's the message that you have on the website and the one that I love is the founders who love to use the message that they use to sell their product, their company to investors

Speaker 5 (11:21):

Also

SANDI (11:22):

To some of their early fit customers, which were almost always warm intros from said investors to however those other new opportunities have come through their door. And what often happens is when marketing is then tasked with, Hey, go find more of these. It's like four different people, it's four different

Speaker 5 (11:40):

Avenues.

SANDI (11:41):

It's four different, four different channels. The budget, there's so much friction that just goes along with trying to replicate early success that we have to say, Hey, let's take a back and let's see who you are. So those are some of the big things. And I think the other big one that I won't get on my soapbox about, but I have lots of strong opinions about is category creation. Everybody wants to create a new category and I'm like, do you have three years and 80 million if you have neither? This isn't it. And the example that I love and hate is people will say, well, they'll talk about Uber and those other ones, but a lot of times they'll say, Hey, so Salesforce, right? Salesforce did not start out as Salesforce. They started out small and then they dominated and they grew. So if that's the path, then let's map out, but let's get in where we fit in right now and let's grow toward that. And that's just, to me, those are some of the more difficult conversations and oftentimes end up, I don't know if you've seen this, but we'll also see founder, founder-led sales where founders have one foot in sales. So it's like I handed it off to my CRO, but I'm still going to be into close or I'm

Speaker 5 (12:55):

Still going to do marketing.

SANDI (12:57):

And so those are challenges we see, but I don't know if you see that often anymore, but that's the last year has been lots of conversations.

LAURA (13:06):

Nailed it. I will tell you the four phases that they are skipping over and operating ahead of is the entire product market fit category in our framework. And it's funny that telling a founder or a team that they don't have product market fit is ultimate calling a baby ugly. I mean, it's like why is there such a stigma there? You want to know if you have product market fit or not so that you can go fix it and let it be known. If you have product market fit one time, it doesn't mean you're always going to have it. You can fall out of product market fit. And so it's this, we call it achieving and then maintaining that. Sometimes the symptom is, ah yeah, we have product market fit with intent and data. And it's like, okay, but then something happens in the market, something happens out of our control maybe with the product, I don't know, and then we don't maintain our product market fit and we have to go back, but they continue to think that they do.

(14:12):

And I just say, let's just normalize it. Let's normalize a yes or no box for product market fit. Because I think that knowing it and trying to act on it is the most heroic thing that you can do. And humbling as a founder is to go back and fix what is broken. I will say in that product market fit, the main thing that is missed that I see is in our stage eight, which is realized value. And so oftentimes, yay, we have first clients and yay, let's get 'em in the door and then let's get 'em in the platform. We're using the service and then we build a sales team. And the two things that we miss are proving our value and ROI back into the business and our customer realizing that value back in their business. And that handshake is something that all the time founders are missing and they're always asking how to do it. And it's not easy because you need product data, you need sentiment, you need relationships, you need some sort of capture process. You need to understand the others, your customers and or your customers customer to build that ROI. And so it's fascinating

(15:32):

That your soapbox is validated with data from our actual assessment.

SANDI (15:39):

Yeah, I think a big part of it too is it's the shared understanding of what value you're actually

Speaker 5 (15:44):

Trying

SANDI (15:44):

To help customers achieve. Which I mean for us, it shows up a lot when we do positioning workshops because we're trying to get to how are you different and really what will customers get out of it? And one of the things that I've seen that, again, I hate to call out is sometimes development teams build really cool stuff, but it's not ultimately useful and valuable in the way that you're describing in the framework. So then what happens is you have this divergence, it's like, yeah, you've got really cool features, these really cool things, but it's not delivering on the promise that you're talking about. And until a competitor comes along and maybe kicks your chair or shows up in opportunities or starts planting questions in your buyer's minds, you don't have to necessarily address it. You can go out talking about all the cool features you have. It only gets you. But so far, and so that's I think part of the work too.

LAURA (16:39):

Do you think AI has accelerated that because everybody's like, no, we have ai. Let's go build it. Let's go find a team to put it in our product. That's

CHRIS (16:47):

It. We don't need anything

SANDI (16:48):

Else. Well, and shame on the investors for a couple of years ago for writing checks for anybody who has a debt AI domain. Hopefully that trains over. But yeah, AI doesn't solve it.

LAURA (17:01):

I think that's pretty systemic right now.

CHRIS (17:04):

So let me ask you this. It's really interesting. You talk about collecting the data, getting insights from the data, and that's really in my mind, just half the battle. So how are you promoting the alignment of people and turning those soft skills and that whole process? What does that look like usually for you?

LAURA (17:24):

Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of organizations are really good with lagging indicators. So this is like, hey, our NRR is good. We check this quarterly, it's great. Everything is wonderful. It is the working backwards into the leading indicators that is the key to what is missing within organizations. And so when we talk about how to do that and it being a necessary evil to actually go back, collect the data, one, I came from a company that was very, I mean it was Tableau. We were looking at data and in its essence, we needed to create a data culture. We needed to create curiosities. It's connecting the why did I win this deal with how can I then go take that and replicate it in my outbound strategy? And so it's mapping the data and the signals back into the actual process funnel process, if you will.

(18:32):

And at each one of those milestones, it's how often are we looking at these data points? Do we have a standard opinion or definition and or formula as to how we are calculating this data mean? So many times maybe sales and marketing will come into the same meeting with potentially the same data showing different numbers. And the reason is we're not looking at all the time. All the time, yeah, we're not looking at the same timeframe. We're not cohorting it. Our formula is wrong. You're using the wrong field. So there's a lot of operational rigor and standardization that needs to happen internally. So data collection is the first key and data integrity. The second key is standardizing definitions, the formulas and how we use it. And then it is mapping it in the business to where we can monitor what's happening with those specific formulas and then looking at what signal that's getting and then talking amongst this team, let's say we were a go-to-market team and saying, what does this mean and how can we use it to take action? And that whole thing seems so simple, but it is not. Oh,

CHRIS (19:47):

You bring up really two really important things. One is I think that alignment around that creates an honesty

Speaker 5 (19:55):

Within

CHRIS (19:55):

A company. If you don't have that, there's a whole bunch of gaming that happens within the system within different departments because if you do have a toxic environment, if you do have an environment where it's very high stress, which a lot of SaaS companies are in particular, you have that. And so that lack of honesty I think slow those companies down, number one. And I think the other thing you mentioned, so that honesty number one, and then the two, the curiosity,

SANDI (20:21):

That's

CHRIS (20:22):

Fascinating to me you saying that because I found that companies that can do that, that have that curiosity and can instill that within the culture, it really starts from leadership. If you can do that, things change drastically. You start to have different conversations, I think.

LAURA (20:39):

Yeah, yeah. I love bringing a set of leaders together or opening up a meeting and saying, what do we need to know? And what did you see in this data that was either alarming or something that was an early warning? Maybe something happened because another kind of dangerous side of that is building a lot of just reports and dashboards that don't get used and they don't mean anything and they're not connected to that answer that you're looking for. And it just sits dormant and then it gets used once a quarter and it's not really put into action. So when you are curious about the business, you go seek the most important data to go collect those things. I do think that there is a caveat to making sure that we're not building our own narrative. I've seen that happen before.

(21:39):

Data tells a story and sometimes the author of that story is looking for an outcome. So they will find the data to create that outcome. Hopefully that's not in a vacuum or a silo, and that's where founders can get in trouble. It's making sure that that curiosity is shared and it's honest throughout the go-to-market team and saying, Hey, I have this curiosity. How can we go find this together? And how can we make sense? Because each member of that team probably has an additional piece of context or qualitative data that's not being captured. That's extremely helpful for the team to understand.

ERIN (22:15):

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I was like, curiosity is great, but you also have to have collaboration, right? Because so many times it's siloed and it's amazing how one data point can mean 5 million different things

Speaker 5 (22:27):

To different people

ERIN (22:29):

And proof points for different stories or narratives.

LAURA (22:33):

Oh, a hundred percent.

SANDI (22:35):

So I talk about this, I talk about that a lot, that the founder's job to establish culture early on and bring in the right people cross-functionally to build a story. When I talk to founders in the hyper accelerator class that I teach, but one of the pitches and one of the pleases that I to make a founders, especially when it comes to looking at data and having the right people in the room, two often forgotten voices that need to be in the room that need to speak up, customer success and engineering engineering, because they are the ones who can answer the, well, why can't we just have X? They're the ones that can add some reality to the roadmap because ultimately when sales and marketing in the room, mostly sales, I'll blame them. They will say, Hey, the reason why we're not winning is because competitively we're at a disadvantage. We need the roadmap to go this way versus that way marketing, we may tell a different story based on the data that we hear, but customer success can tell us a lot about the value that someone's actually realizing and those unsung kind of features and

(23:43):

Some of the language that ultimately feeds back into the narratives that marketing needs to hear. So sometimes they're left out of that conversation. And then from an engineering's point of view, they need to hear all of that because that gives some context around who they're ultimately buying for. And the point I made earlier about engineering, just going off and building cool features, one of the ways that you guard against that is to pull them more into the conversation around the story that we tell around the thing. Because it's not just the thing. It's like the thing is only as useful as the person who can then get some value out of it. And so both of them need to be in the room, and both of those parties usually do bring one clarity context. Oh, clarity, context, curiosity. Yeah, we've got our three Cs. I know, I

LAURA (24:25):

Know. Look at me. Okay, who was making the shirt? No

SANDI (24:28):

Threes. But yeah, I think those parties are often just they're not there and they can add sort of another, another lens through which to look at data and to make those kinds of decisions

LAURA (24:42):

And you or whomever can foster and facilitate that in a couple of different ways. So I do think that each function and department has that unique kind of piece of the puzzle that each other person needs. And what I like to do is build an operating cadence that allows for that. So people get data and information in three different ways, maybe. Yeah, three different ways. They see it, they hear it, they read it maybe two different ways. And to make sure that the modality of how you are communicating internally, data narratives. I mean at Tableau, and actually at Tableau, we had Adams Lipsky come and join us. He was our CEO of, he was previously at AWS join us in about 2018 and mandated that we all do narratives internally. And that's kind of the Amazon way is you build this language narrative based on your annual planning or this project, the product that you want to launch. Other companies don't do that, but it's recognizing how information is being exchanged internally and it's on us to make sure that we have the proper communication that people understand what we are trying to communicate and it's reciprocated that way. So I like to use a whole bunch of different modalities when we're, because someone might look at data and just get completely confused and say, I'm just not a numbers person. So it's making sure that we're meeting everyone on the level that they can consume information as well and sharing that on that level.

ERIN (26:27):

Do you have any sort of, I mean I know you do, but so we've talked about silo teams and people not talking to each other or some people not being numbers people. How do you bridge that gap? I'm sure that probably client after client, after client has this situation, so it's like how do you help navigate that with them?

LAURA (26:49):

Yeah, I like to call it an operational cadence. So building in specific space or time during the week, I don't want to say meetings, but whatever allotting time to deliver and consume information. So sure, meeting love a good shared calendar. So I love having, and these are pretty tactical items, but it all goes into this operating cadence as a revenue operator, I've found that providing a rev ops weekly, which is a rhythm of the business to my stakeholders in a visual and in a written format, helps them understand, and I still do the narrative because I want them to understand how I think. So it's not just, here's the dashboard, look at it. It's let me walk you through how I am seeing this data. Here are pipeline gaps. This is what the data is telling us. This allows me to assume X. And so they get to understand how I think and that's consumed, and then we meet on that as a format or we could keep it async if we're really good at that.

(28:08):

Then it is carving out that space and time with shared calendars optional, making sure we're prepared for meetings. There's a whole bunch of tips and tricks on aligning people. I also like to do a good roadshow, invite me to the marketing meeting. Let me sit with the product team or in a support queue and let me just listen. We've gotten amazing conversation intelligence tools that can record videos or record conversations and I can listen to 'em. You've got some ai, give me the hot tips from it. So I think we need to meet people where they're at and it's creating space and time to connect, not just live, but async as well. Yeah,

ERIN (28:52):

That's so important. I think so many assumptions can be made when people across the data. So the fact that it's kind of a combo between async and live and like you said, meeting people where they're at because someone can see one piece of data and kind of have this whole story behind it, but you're looking at it more holistically of see where you're coming from, but then also look at a, B and C over

LAURA (29:15):

Year. And I have a current client right now that we have every week, a 45 minute early warning meeting. And so we bring all the data together, everybody consumes the rev ops weekly, there's constituents from across the business and that have maybe a piece of the puzzle in their mind. They do their homework. We come to the early warning meeting or saying, what did we see? And let's talk about it. And while that may feel like an extra meeting on the calendar, I haven't proven or I don't have data of what type of things that it's mitigating in the future, but I can definitely assure you that we are increasing our efficiency to create action and make moves within the business because that meeting exists. And so it's just something, maybe eventually it will go away, but this is a muscle that people need to learn how to use. And then once they get to use it, then it can go off the calendar. So

SANDI (30:19):

That's probably an anxiety reducing exercise that, I mean, startups who are listening, please take heed and implement that early on so that you prevent the big company bad habits. Because I mean, I can count on one hand that the scale ups in the larger companies that I'm thinking about that could really use that because of the politics and just the fear and of the siloed, some of the unintended consequences of having that siloed team structure where every entity reports on the numbers. And there isn't that overall narrative. I mean,

Speaker 5 (30:59):

Some

SANDI (30:59):

Of those things breed a lot of mistrust, a lot of one-off projects, a lot of a lack of cooperation when you need it the most. So I feel like that's just, that might be a really good habit for everyone to implement no matter how big or small you are.

CHRIS (31:21):

I can attest to the fact that wheels, you make a good spy. You've sat in on my meetings before, you've sat in on my meetings before. But you know what, it was really helpful though because aligned everyone how to think about things in the same way. And so to your point, I mean it really does work and it takes a good person in that role to be able to do that.

LAURA (31:42):

And I took a lot of takeaways of homework of things that I could go help with or go uncover or task me with connecting the dots here and bringing that back to the next meeting or so, or actually informing. So there is action to that. That's so funny. I do sometimes feel like a spy within the business.

CHRIS (32:05):

That's funny.

SANDI (32:06):

I think larger companies, at least the few that I've seen of late, they've put that task on the chief of staff, which feels a little bit, sometimes a little bit too much like the CMOs henchman and not enough of the person who's got the bird's eye view of the broader business. What have you seen?

LAURA (32:29):

There's a fine balance between who a chief of staff is. I actually started as a chief of staff in Tableau. We didn't have a name for ops. I don't even think rev ops was a thing back in 2014, but they needed someone from the business that could operationally think of how to solve all these problems and where to go find the root cause of what was happening with leads falling off or partnerships doing this or X, Y, Z, or where are we winning here? Why did they sign this contract? And they had general curiosities, they just didn't have someone to go chase those down. So that's kind of where a really good chief of staff can come in. I think sometimes it gets a little mislabeled internally. So chief of staff, rev ops, go to market engineer now, I think they call it now, go to market spy, I don't know what's the next iteration of rev ops for 2026?

SANDI (33:30):

I don't like it used to be ops, now it's rev ops and it will now be chief of staff spy COSS.

CHRIS (33:38):

It forms the basis of a good strategy unit as well. It

SANDI (33:41):

Really does.

ERIN (33:44):

Agreed. What's your ideal structure? I guess this is a two-parter. When should an organization bring Rev ops in and how is it best structured ideally?

LAURA (33:54):

Yeah. I mean, let's be honest. When you are early stage and you are just getting off the ground, maybe million to 3 million, I would bring in an ops specialist. And typically this is just my take here. Typically that's going to be someone that has heavy marketing ops or sales ops background as a specialist because that's when top of funnel is so critical in capturing those leads and making sure that campaigns and tags, and they can also dabble in A CRM. Some marketing automation tools are CRMs. And so I'm a firm believer of having some sort of marketing or sales ops specialist that can toggle both of those in very early stage. Hopefully you have some sort of finance person to help with the billing, then you need to get more sophisticated. So now you're looking at full funnel, you're not looking at just capture, but you need to retain this revenue.

(34:58):

And so that's really when that full funnel person can come in, that's a sales ops individual. They understand kind of go to market, they understand a full customer cycle or journey. They are really good at stakeholder alignment, and that's these disparate go-to-market potential leaders or sales reps that are in the business. So I'd say that's probably a more sales ops role. And then moving forward, once you get a little more sophisticated, you're protecting 5 million to 10 million a RR. Then you bring on someone that is more of a strategist because at the time, don't want to overbuild a process that you haven't validated yet. And so too many times there's some really cool and sexy tools out there and it's all piecemeal together, and then all of a sudden you're staring at 10 million a RR and you're like, how do we protect this and how do we standardize and how did we get here?

(35:57):

And so it then bifurcates into, okay, what's our go-to-market strategy? Where do we find repeatability and what are the tools and systems that support that? And so then you start to level out an operations organization and whether that's a go-to-market ops person that can also dabble in sales ops or marketing ops. So you start to kind of piece the puzzle together where skill sets can cover the tactical and the strategy because that sales leader or those reps are going to come to you and ask, what's my playbook and how am I supposed to be successful? And what is the best messaging that's working with lifetime value customers? And are we sure that this is our ICP? So we need to now feed that back into the business? And then now we're like the person whispering in the ear saying like, go do this and blah, blah, blah. And it's proven from that standpoint.

CHRIS (36:57):

That's really interesting because you bring up a lot of things. What I think of Sandi in terms of the product marketing side. So how do you draw that line between ops and product marketing? How do you best work

LAURA (37:10):

Together? Oh, besties. I mean, let's be honest, that's how

SANDI (37:14):

We bonded.

LAURA (37:15):

Actually, there are two besties and then a silent bestie in an operations org. First is if I can partner with product marketing person, oh my God, that is beautiful. That means because, and it depends on where you think enablement sits. Sometimes enablement sits at all places, but I'm going to snag it up into revenue operations. I was an enabler. I've rolled up into many a different things, but we need to create assets and talk to each other. And it's this iteration between, I can't cover product, but man, if I can have a product and marketing and then I can help cover sales and marketing and customer success, and we can come together, that is a beautiful union. And then whatever swimming lanes we decide on, whoever owns operations enablement, whoever owns creating assets and materials, whoever helps train the team, that's beautifully symbolic.

SANDI (38:20):

Sorry, I love you wheels. I know.

LAURA (38:23):

But it's so interesting because product marketing is such a nice Venn diagram to the rest of the organization to ops, but too often it's not invested in. And so that falls into the bucket of who's going to own that internally. And so then we share responsibility internally. But it's such a great resource.

SANDI (38:48):

And I think one of the other things that happens with product marketing on, and it's one of the questions I always ask whether I'm interviewing a new client or back when I was interviewing for roles, is where's the center of gravity in your organization? If sales runs it, then I know as a product marketer, I'm going to put my enablement on. I will be enabling the daylight out of this team. If product runs it, I will be the launch queen. If

Speaker 5 (39:09):

Marketing

SANDI (39:10):

Runs it, I will be the campaign quarterback. If they can't answer the question, then I have to dive in and figure out from the CEO's perspective, who do they turn to? Is it the cmo, the Sarah,

LAURA (39:21):

The cpr? Yeah, maybe that's a good indicator of what type of X LED growth. Are you currently trying to, or is your current motion right now whether you're customer led, sales led, product led,

SANDI (39:37):

Founder led,

LAURA (39:38):

Founder led, whatever that is, you do kind of align your resources there. What then happens is what happens if you change your X LED growth strategy? And that gets interesting in making sure that you have the signals back into the business to be cognizant of then what type of resources you do need. So I think, Erin, to your question, it is, that's probably another aspect of what type of LED growth you're really is driving revenue within the organization.

ERIN (40:07):

That makes sense. And so many times that evolves, right? Oh my gosh. It's like, wait,

LAURA (40:13):

You're like, wait, how did we become a sales led organization? Well, and it's true because a lot of the freemium or the product trials are like, try try before you buy, buy, buy is like product led ish growth and signals, and then they want to build that out. But so often that non-human touch drives down your A SP. And so when you are trying to truly drive enterprise value, that is where a sales led growth comes in. And not saying that you can't have both, but they also need to connect because those two motions, those two funnels need to feed into each other.

SANDI (40:51):

And often the story is completely different. I know the marketing motion is night and day, so it's flipping the switch upon that. That's one of those, what? It's hard. It's, it's impossible. It's literally impossible. I mean, I love sitting in calls where Chris will say, I just hired the entire wrong team. You just hired the entire wrong team for what you want to do.

CHRIS (41:14):

Oh, you've heard, yes, she has that.

SANDI (41:16):

Yes. And that before his face just changes because it's like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Or if you suddenly want to go from SMB to enterprise, well, you better call Erin and get a heck of a lot of content because you've got to support the journey and all of those,

Speaker 5 (41:32):

Just

SANDI (41:32):

All of those things. So I love it. I love wheels that you have a framework to help founders really identify truly where they are versus how they're operating and just what it would take to either shore up their operations to get there or what they need to kind of back the bus up on and say like, Hey, we got to have to go fix this.

LAURA (41:53):

Yeah, we have to go fix. Yeah, you can't fix what you can't see. And at the end of the day, if we talk about mediums, I can only tell founders so many times that they don't have product market fit, but if they take our assessment and see literally visually in this graph that you do not have product market fit, if you have a red bar there, then we need to talk. And if that's the reality. So if that's the 14th time that I've told 'em, but they see that for the first time and they're like, okay, I get it now, then that's all I need. So

SANDI (42:26):

Cool. Well, we have kept you. We could keep you for another hour, honestly.

LAURA (42:31):

Oh, I love this. I love this so much,

SANDI (42:33):

And I always love our chats. When I think it was our first call, we ended up just shooting the shit on rev ops and sales enablement product marketing and startups and frameworks and all of the things. So it's just so great to see you live in it now and actually going out and helping even more founders fix their operations. But where can folks find you, other than the karaoke bar, where can people find you?

LAURA (43:03):

Oh, that's so true. I feel like

SANDI (43:05):

There's stories there. Yeah, girls can sing. She can sing.

LAURA (43:12):

I'm not going to say I was the lead singer movie, but I might've been. So no, you can find me probably at the nerding out the latest conference, but the best way to get ahold of me is on LinkedIn, and I'm pretty active there. So hit me up, send me a DM, connect or follow me, and we can share war stories like this. I love nerding out on early stage foundational journeys with founders and how they can start to integrate operations. So it's a deep passion of mine, let's just say that besides singing.

SANDI (43:50):

Awesome. Love it. Well, hey, thank you so much for joining us and sharing the wisdom and sharing a laugh with us, and we look forward to following RV and you Duck Co wherever it goes.

LAURA (44:03):

Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank

SANDI (44:05):

You. Thank you. Bye.

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